Emergent Digital Practices

Creatively Shape the Future

The Emergent Digital Practices program brings together art, design, media, culture and technology studies in a hands-on, collaborative environment. Technology links academic disciplines with professional fields and joins shared communities with our personal lives in many new and exciting ways. To understand and explore this landscape, we infuse the digital practices of making and writing with contemporary critical approaches to cultural technologies, media philosophy, the critique and investigation of electronic and new media arts, and studies in science fiction, trans-global politics and science.

EDP appeals to students who are more broadly defined creative types and critical thinkers because the lines between artists, designers, scholars, and inventors have largely dissolved. The EDP program prepares students who seek to work in spaces beyond what is already defined and familiar. For instance:

an artist creating interactive tools to improve strained international relations

a computer programmer making design and story-telling decisions for a game about economics

a writer performing audio-visual remixes to challenge our ideas of narrative form

a scientist creating virtual spaces and experiences to visualize, explore and convey ideas about climate change

Created in the fall of 2011, Emergent Digital Practices offers undergraduate students either a BA or a BFA, and graduate students a 2 year MA and a 3 year MFA. Our degrees challenge you to think and create with purpose—to become new leaders in the development and application of the emerging, the previously untried, and the otherwise unimagined forms of knowledge, technology, and culture that will shape our future. The new Emergent Digital Practices program is an evolution and merger of two longstanding programs at the University of Denver: Electronic Media Arts & Design and Digital Media Studies (one of the fist such programs in the US) - together having existed for nearly 35 years.

Whatever paths you pursue—further academic study, professional careers, social activism or nonprofit service—our unique combination of applied critical thinking, creative expression and social engagement through technology-infused settings will help you to thrive.

The EDP degree program fuses together the former programs of Digital Media Studies and Electronic Media Arts & Design. Current students may complete their degrees in these areas, but those programs are not accepting new students.